How paying less gets you more
98% cost reduction compared to hiring consultants
In our market validation interviews with city planners, real estate teams, and public sector decision-makers, one thing came up again and again. You don’t adopt new tools for fun. You adopt them when the ROI is clear and the value shows up quickly.
A single consultancy-led study into how people experience a city can cost anywhere between €8,000 and €65,000 (and even more), depending on the scope of the project. And the moment the final PDF is delivered, the data is already starting to age.
KONTEXT starts at €59 per month or €708 annually. For that, you get 365 days of continuously updated insight for less than 2% of the cost of one mid-range consultant project. Most teams choose the PRO plan at €199 per month because the data coverage is significantly broader, but the point still stands: each of our plan delivers a return that traditional consultancies cannot match.
10x cheaper than hiring interns
You might say, “We don’t hire consultants. We have interns keep an eye on what people are saying online.”
Even then, an intern in Western Europe costs roughly €900 to €3,000 per month, excluding costs for onboarding, supervision, and overhead. In their time, they might scan a few hundred posts or articles.
KONTEXT does the same job at a completely different scale and at a fraction of the cost. It screens millions of public conversations around the clock, without supervision, and your interns get to do what they should be doing: learning the business.
90x cheaper than building your own pipeline
Most architecture studios, tourism authorities, real estate developers, and urban strategy teams do not have data scientists on staff. So building a custom pipeline usually starts with hiring a data magician.
That alone brings significant cost. Recruiting and onboarding typically run between €10,000 and €20,000, salaries add €3,800 to €8,000 per month, and when that person eventually leaves, replacing them can cost another €60,000 to €90,000.
These figures come from a breakdown of hidden hiring and turnover costs for in-house developers, based largely on DECODE’s 2025 analysis of developer hiring in Europe.
A KONTEXT subscription gives you a maintained, domain-specific stack for a fraction of that (the 90x cheaper is based on a PRO subscription for one year and an estimated cost of €180,000 for hiring a developer, including budget for replacement). Instead of building and rebuilding infrastructure behind the scenes, you get a system that is already running, kept up to date, and designed for people who need to understand cities from within without having to write code themselves or hire a data team.
7000% faster than commissioned research
No joke. If you have ever designed a study yourself, you know the drill: A conventional survey moves in batches. You design the survey, recruit participants, run fieldwork, clean the data, write the report, and only then do results reach the people who need them.
Even when everything goes smoothly, that cycle takes anywhere between 7 and 17 weeks. KONTEXT works on a different clock. Instead of waiting for a study to finish, the platform reads what people are already saying about places every day and refreshes its analysis every 24 hours. That's a whopping 7000% faster than a 10-week-long survey. If a policy changes today or a project hits the news, the response is visible tomorrow morning.
Urban and survey-methods research increasingly points out that cities change too quickly for slow, one-off studies to keep up. High-frequency digital traces are now seen as a necessary complement to traditional fieldwork, precisely because they reduce the gap between what happens and what decision-makers know.
In practice, that means KONTEXT cuts the lag between urban reality and usable insight from months to a single day.
1000x more input than in a public meeting
(Ok, we fully admit this one involves a bit of our own judgement rather than a formal citation. But the underlying logic behind it is solid.) We are not here to replace public meetings. They matter. In fact, we believe that hearings, workshops, and participatory processes remain a cornerstone of democratic and sustainable urban development.
The fundamental challenge in traditional participatory formats is scale. In our experience, a well-run workshop or hearing might reach a few dozen people. Those voices deserve to be heard, no doubt - when major decisions are on the table, the question is whether a roomful of participants is enough to represent how the broader public actually experiences the situation.
Meanwhile, billions of posts are written on platforms like Reddit each year, and millions of places are reviewed on Google. With 68% of the world online, the pool of residents who leave public digital traces is several times larger than the subset that ever answers one of your surveys or goes to meetings.
Even when only a small fraction of that conversation relates to a given city, it still represents orders of magnitude more lived experience than any room-based format can capture.